The Cup that rules the world

It unites continents, is watched by billions and its stars are treated as living gods. No contest can touch it for suspense or despair. Jason Cowley, editor of Observer Sport Monthly, celebrates sport's premier competition

The official slogan of this, the 18th World Cup, is 'A Time to Make Friends' and the Germans certainly endeared themselves to many at the spectacular Allianz Arena on a warm evening in Munich on Friday by choreographing an opening ceremony that had a restrained if anxious charm, consistent with the new Germany itself. Above all, it was short.

Too often, opening ceremonies are memorable only for their great length, pomposities and errors. But the Germans clearly understand that what we are here for, what the hundreds of millions around the world watching on television require, are not displays of nationalistic posturing, as will no doubt disfigure the Olympics in Beijing in 2008 and certainly disgraced the 1936 Games in Berlin, or elaborate song and dance routines, but simply this: the football.

Everything else - the marketing, the sponsorship, the corporate hospitality, the branding, even the hot chatter of the media - is irrelevant when compared with what happens on the field of play. And these early weeks of the tournament, when all 32 countries are involved, representing six continents, have a magical allure and fascination, as well as offering, one hopes, genuine surprise and unpredictability, such as when Senegal, competing in their first World Cup, beat the defending champions France in the opening match of the 2002 tournament in Japan and South Korea.

Billions of people watched that last World Cup, and billions will to do so again. Nearly every country in the world has bought TV rights for the tournament at an overall cost of £826m. Germany 2006 seems set to be the grandest and most significant event of its kind in history: a festival, a competition, a celebration, a fantasy.

Nothing unites, fascinates or excites the world more than football. The Olympics is a festival of all sports, but while the athletes compete under a national flag, in truth they represent nobody but themselves. With the exception of a few team events, the Olympics are about individual glory: the fastest, the strongest, the most durable. And they are increasingly tainted by suspicion: surely, if they can run that fast and jump that high, they must be taking something, we cry.

The World Cup is also about individual glory, but as expressed through the ethic and collective of the team. There can be only one winner, and it is about only one sport - football - the greatest game of all, the dominant cultural form of our time and the lingua franca of our new globalisation. Wherever I go in the world, but especially in the developing world - in, say, Rwanda, Mauritius or Zimbabwe - I meet people who, when they know that I am English and work in London, want to talk to me about only football. 'You support Arsenal, yes, Thierry Henry...' And they're off.

The leading players at this World Cup - Ronaldinho, Henry, David Beckham, Michael Ballack, Zinedine Zidane, Wayne Rooney, Didier Drogba - are among the most recognised and celebrated people on the planet. They are objects of fantasy and desire, their lives an index of thrilling possibilities, their wealth stupendous, their wanderings, from club to club, in Europe and beyond, representative of a new deracinated cosmopolitanism - yet their backgrounds are mostly humble. They are, in the main, from poor families; many learnt the game on the streets and, in some cases, in the ghettos. It is wondrous, this capacity of football to liberate and empower the disadvantaged, the impoverished, the reviled.

Football is an engine of aggressive meritocracy; it subverts the old racial and political hierarchies. It is not an expression of American or even Caucasian power and control. Brazil, a teeming, largely impoverished, developing nation, is the greatest footballing country of all, five-times winners of the World Cup and favourites again this time. Many of the most talented players in the Brazilian team, and increasingly in the best European teams as well, are black or mixed race. Football, political commentator Martin Jacques wrote recently in the Observer Sport Monthly, has a rebellious and subversive quality. 'It is the game of the masses, which is why it is increasingly a game of colour ... it is difficult to think of another walk of life where those not only of African descent but also largely from poor countries are so admired and acclaimed.'

Yet this tournament, so rich in promise, is also shadowed by menace and threat. First, there is the threat of terrorism, Islamic or otherwise, something Germany understands all too well after the Munich Olympics of 1972 were destroyed by the kidnap and murder of 11 Israeli athletes by Palestinian militants. The threat of terrorism means that the security at this tournament is omnipresent and the players themselves, especially those from the powerful Western nations, are like gilded prisoners in their luxury hotels: watched, monitored, policed, protected. The unfortunate effect of this is to distance them still further from the rest of us, from the fans.

There are other, lesser threats, too, and these come from within a game, which, at times, seems intent on eating itself. Never before, it is true, have so many people been as repelled as they are by the ethos of football as represented by our rapacious leading clubs. Even Sepp Blatter, president of the sport's governing body Fifa, complains of football's 'wild west style of capitalism' and of elite players earning 'pornographic amounts'.

Club football in Europe, at the highest level, is increasingly about little more than greed and exploitation, especially of the fans. The dominance of Chelsea proves that it is easy to buy success. Footballers are mercenaries; they will always follow the money. Chelsea may have won consecutive Premiership titles, but their main achievement is to have aggressively destroyed any sense of open competition. They have the most complete squad in the Premiership, assembled at a cost in transfer fees of more than £300m. Yet, despite reporting losses last year of £140m, they have just signed two of the world's best players, Michael Ballack from Bayern Munich and Andriy Shevchenko from AC Milan. Each is believed to be earning, before tax, as much as £160,000 a week. A gross figure indeed.

Chelsea have also signed the Nigerian prodigy John Obi Mikel after a distasteful and protracted contractual dispute that resulted in the London club paying £12m to Manchester United for a player who was actually under contract to FC Lyn of Oslo, who received £4m. Make sense of that, if you can.

Elsewhere, many of our leading clubs, notably Arsenal, are English only in the most tangential sense of being located in this country. They have very few English players; their youth and development squads are populated by a multinational elite of young boys brought to England to be trained and developed. The local hero, the boy who once paid to watch the club for which he now plays, is rare indeed.

The social, cultural and economic distance between those who watch in the stands and those who play has never been starker: what the novelist Gordon Burn calls 'the love of sport as an expression of the love of place' is close to being lost. The contract between fans and players ripped up, the imaginary ties that bind severed.

Meanwhile, Italy arrive in Germany on the backwash of yet another corruption scandal in football. The Italian champions Juventus, one of the greatest of all club sides, have been accused, not for the first time, of buying favours and choosing their own referees. It is unlikely that Italian football shall ever be free from the stink of corruption: in this, it is a merely a mirror of the Italian nation, the nation of the network, the bribe, the brotherhood.

Yet for all the unregulated excesses of the club game - the greed, the hysteria, the disreputable agents and meretricious owners - there is still a kind of purity to international competitions such as the World Cup, which may serve as a counterbalance to all that has gone wrong in this era of Roman Abramovich and the Glazer family.

For a start, and most obviously, you cannot buy in players for the national team; on the whole, in spite of occasional manipulation of the rules of nationality, you have to work with what you have. Because of this, the England team does embody and represent the nation in a way that clubs no longer can, and so international football increasingly serves as a powerful expression of identity and of both soft and hard nationalism. The love of the national team is bound up, especially in England and some of the Latin and South American states, with the love of the nation.

English nationalism is a curious phenomenon; it is often covert, apologetic, bashful even, and linked in complicated ways with the long retreat of empire, the problematic legacy of colonialism and our uneasy relationship with our Celtic confreres. Our national day passes largely unnoticed, and, despite the presence of the British National Party, there is no significant electoral advantage to be had from nationalist sloganeering, as William Hague and Michael Howard discovered during their dismal general election campaigns of recent years, and the more liberal and thus more engaging David Cameron understands.

Yet in the run-up to and during a major football tournament everything changes. The old restraint disappears. As I drove to the airport last week on a lovely, calm afternoon, I was astonished by just how many people, from the windows of their houses or in their cars, were flying the flag of St George. Before that, out on the streets and in the clubs, bars, pubs and offices, I was surrounded by the incessant buzz of football talk, from both men and women.

At first, I thought there was something mildly hysterical about all this: have we nothing better to concern ourselves with than a mere football tournament, with men at play? Now, away from the country, it seems appropriate, at one with the grandeur of the occasion; these manifestations of soft nationalism - the flags, the plastic hats, the silly songs - are largely benign, little more than a release from the mundane, an expression of commonality and mutual interest - and an excuse, for both sexes, to party and to drink. It is all very distant from the belligerence of the hooligans who followed England abroad in the Seventies and Eighties.

The atmosphere is quite different in Germany. Here the nationalism, despite the presence of a vocal far right, especially in the more depressed eastern states, seems more understated and softer still. During my short time here I have seen no German flags fluttering from cars or, with the exception of Munich's main city centre square where big screens have been erected, no one wearing replica national team shirts.

All the same, this is a country delighted to be hosting the World Cup and the feeling of goodwill is tremendous: Franz Beckenbauer, Germany's greatest player of all time and, as head of the organising committee, the tournament's figurehead, spoke of how football 'makes a better world, it's a game that brings tribes together. It is our historic opportunity here now in Germany to be good hosts, to show the world who we are.'

Is there a nation more conscious of its history than Germany? To the German-Jewish philosopher Walter Benjamin, suspended uneasily between two world wars, history amounted to nothing but the accumulation of rubble. Since the total and humiliating defeat of 1945, the Soviet occupation and division of the country, Germany has been working assiduously to escape from the singular catastrophe of Nazism, been seeking to make whole what was smashed.

Yet whenever the world has turned as one towards Germany it has had both to look and to look away, because the reality was often too much to bear. The 1972 Olympics were a disaster, terrorist-blighted; the 1974 World Cup, in West Germany, was a more progressive event, but it served then only to remind us of the uneasy reality of our contradictory world and of the unhappy division of the host nation itself, not least because the two Germanys played against each other, with the East winning 1-0, a melancholy game played in torrential rain.

For the German journalist Alexander Osang, writing in the latest Prospect, the 1974 World Cup, the first to be held on German soil, 'meant nothing' to those such as he growing up in the old GDR. He felt shut out, his world 'small and island-like'. But now Germany is unified, if sometimes unsteadily; it has its first female Chancellor, Angela Merkel, the daughter of an East German pastor, and a football captain, Ballack, who is also from the old East.

The coach of the national team is Jurgen Klinsmann, a new kind of kind of German football cosmopolitan. He is a polyglot and a resident of California, having lived previously in Italy, France and England. As a coach he is committed, as we saw on Friday evening, to a direct, open, attacking game, more in the style of Arsene Wenger's Arsenal than the cautious and hugely efficient German teams of old.

Osang, like many younger Germans, and indeed like the articulate Klinsmann himself, is an optimist: emerging intact from the rubble of the past, they want only to look forwards, not back. They do not want to be tethered to the forces of history. They believe that this tournament, a media extravaganza such as we have never seen before, offers Germany, which attracts significantly fewer tourists than any other leading European nation, the opportunity as hosts to show the world what it has become. This is, as Beckenbauer said on the eve of the tournament, a 'once-in-a-lifetime chance' for the new Germany.

And so it is. Leaving the Allianz Stadium on Friday night, having watched the hosts beat Costa Rica 4-2 in a frenetic and entertaining game, it felt that everything was just so. And so it still seemed yesterday, despite England's fretful route to a desultory 1-0 victory over Paraguay.

With luck, all will remain that way, and on the night of 9 July, when the winning captain lifts the burnished 18-carat gold Fifa World Cup, we shall be able to look back on and savour what was the greatest sporting occasion of them all. Let it unfurl.